Title Affiliations Abstract "Moving Language: An Investigation into Text's Kinetic Potential in Theatre." "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "The project 'Moving Language: An Investigation into Text's Kinetic Potential in Theatre', will examine the dominating presence of textuality within the work of certain contemporary artists and the way in which it triggers a new form of theatricality. The use of text in the work of, amongst others, Mette Edvardsen, Jan Lauwers and Abke Haring, is deeply influenced by dance aesthetics and therefore very distinct from traditional text theatre. Text is no longer used to produce the words of a certain character (mimetic), neither does it function as mere material presence, within the realm of other performative elements. The aforementioned artists make explicit use of text, in a way that is not conceivable by use of current theoretic paradigms on text. This peculiar status forces scholars to rethink and redefine theory on textuality and to connect it with concepts from performance studies, such as 'embodiment', 'presence' and 'spatiality', concepts that are less likely to be used in dominant theoretic contemplations on textuality. This project departs from this theoretical impetus and will work around the hypothesis that certain contemporary uses of text can be labelled as 'kinetic'. Therefore, the conceptualising of text from a mimetic/semiotic view will be connected with and replaced by a kinetic framework, which will enable performance scholars to study contemporary textual tendencies within the realm of physicality and spatiality. This research project is thus both practical and theoretical: by use of a selected corpus, traditional (theoretical) conceptions will be redefined to frame how textuality in contemporary text theatre 'moves' around the performative dynamic." "CE CULT2018/COOP1 Actes de Création et Dynamiques de Collaborations Croisées - Arts de la Scène. (ARGOS)" "Luc Van Den Dries" "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "The ARGOS project intends to create the conditions for a new sharing of knowledge in the field of performing arts. It is based on an original collaboration between theatrical researchers, artists, students, cultural mediators and spectators. All of these participants will be gathered in communities to observe European creative processes on five fields: Belgium, France, Italy, Greece and Portugal. The mobility of these communities thus formed will make it possible to experience intercultural and inter-professional dialogue and to reinforce the skills and abilities of each participant, the hypothesis being that the experience of otherness and physical and symbolic displacement is a lever for transforming the members of these communities. During the 30 months of the ARGOS project, the academic, artistic and cultural partners are implementing five experiments that each give a place and a different role to these communities. It is a question of witnessing strong and singular artistic gestures on diversified European sites by experiencing the creative processes according to two great modes of relationship: the face-to-face and the digital. Indeed, some members of these communities will attend and participate directly in the creation process, when others will be associated by a streaming and live connection. With these two modes of presence, communities test different forms of observation: integrated observation with Teatro O Bando (Portugal) where the viewers are engaged in the sharing of a place and a time community; the participant observation with Chiara Guidi of the Societas Rafaello Sanzio (Italy and Greece), where the viewers act directly on the creative process; virtual observation with the National Theater of Brittany (France), where the viewers are equipped with virtual reality headphones and live the rehearsals in immersion; the creative observation with Au bout du plongeoir (France), where the viewers seize the materials and documents used by the artistic team to imagine a transmedia story of their experience; intercultural observation with Moussem (Belgium and Lebanon), where viewers are encouraged to experience the diversity of their cultural roots in perceptual practice." "Service Flemish Opera" "Pascal Gielen" "Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts (ARIA)" "It is only about sharing research information through lectures, introductions to concerts. The research information comes from the research that Arne Herman continues in the context of sustainable creativity research." "A stage for the world: towards an inclusive theatre experience." "Aline Remael" "Research Centre for Visual Poetics, Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies (TricS)" "This project aims to investigate how the theatrical experience can be made accessible for blind and visually impaired patrons through audio description (AD), a specific audiovisual translation (AVT) mode that translates visual information into verbal information. Current audio description models focus mostly on rendering the story of a film or theatre performance accessible, and are therefore mainly inspired by narratology. Many aspects of a theatre performance such as the atmosphere, the aesthetics, the way actors physically ""fill"" their role, lighting, costumes, the use of video projections etc. are insufficiently taken into account. And it is precisely these features that are central to an integral theatrical experience. On the basis of a corpus of performances of Toneelhuis and NTGent this project will develop a new AD model that will allow for these intermedial features to be included in the translation for the target group. To this end, the intentions of the creative process will be integrated into the AD production." "Trading Dance: Transatlantic Currencies in Belgian Postwar Choreography, 1958-1991" "Kurt Vanhoutte" "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "The recent history of Western postwar dance is often construed as a one-way narrative in which the center of artistic innovation moved from the United States of America to Europe from the 1980s onwards. This stereotypical view, however, disregards the transatlantic exchanges that underlie this shift and rather reproduces what has been called the ""American Century,"" a period that roughly started around 1900 and which marks the supposedly sweeping dominance of the United States across the globe. This project will provide a much-needed corrective to the predominant historicization of postwar dance by tracing how transatlantic currencies have been instrumental to the field as it stands now. Taking the dance scene in Belgium as an exemplary test case to investigate the formative influence of the mutual relationships with the USA, the project will illuminate a hitherto understudied part of dance history from a perspective that considers both local and international tendencies. Starting from the 1958 World Exhibition in Brussels, the period under scrutiny will run until 1991, the year when the American choreographer Mark Morris ended his term as Director of Dance at the Brussel's Royal Theatre La Monnaie and was succeeded by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her company Rosas. Combining dance aesthetics and cultural history with archival research and in-depth interviews, the project will offer the first thorough historical study of transatlantic currencies in postwar choreography." "Material matters: Towards a New Materialist Approach to Contemporary Performance Art." "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "21st century questions about the ways in which we produce and consume our material environment have given rise to a new focus in contemporary performance art. A growing group of artists are taking the stage to explore the performative entanglement of human beings and material objects, often in order to critically question the interplay of nonhuman actors in everyday life. By doing so, these performances also ask for new modes of performance analysis and interpretation that incorporate an understanding of (nonhuman) materiality as inherently performative. To this day, most performance scholars are still of the belief that the co-presence of human beings is the most fundamental characteristic of performance art, which often results in the reduction of material objects to their decorative status or to their function as documentation of the live performance that is lost for good. This project aims to encounter these present-day performances through the recent insights of new materialism(s). New materialism is a contemporary theory that, simply put, articulates the idea that all matter has the ability to act in this world, and that agency is distributed amongst materialities in space and time. This indicates a remarkable shift: objects are no longer defined as passive things, ruled and interpreted by human subjects, but are valued as vital and unstable entities that can exert an influence on other (human) entities. Subsequently, new materialism also embodies a transversal gesture that experiences the relationship between meaning and matter, culture and nature, and subject and object as non-hierarchical and co-constitutive (Coole and Frost 2010; Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). By connecting these concepts of new materialism to traditional key-notions within the debate on the ontological characteristics of performance art and performance experience, this project pursues to establish a mode of analysis that allows for a focus on how human and nonhuman agencies intertwine and generate new meanings within this performative entanglement." KOSMOTEKA. "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "Soviet science fiction cinema is part of European film heritage, and was a strong influence on Eastern European 20th century science fiction cinema and its visions of the future. Today, Soviet popular culture, including science fiction cinema, dealing with the dawn of the space age, is sometimes categorized within a single archive of ""cosmos-themed"" Soviet popular culture. The cinematic archive of cosmos-themed films comprises over 45 entries, collected as ""films on outer space"" in the archives of the Television studio of the Russian Space Agency (Tvroscosmos). The archive has not yet been researched, although it is a collection which is globally exceptional in its thematic focus and genre-diversity. Outer space-related science fiction films account for approximately half of all Soviet science fiction cinematography. The genre of science fiction offered a means of visualizing the anticipated consequences of spaceflight – the so-called beginning of the space age in the 1960s, consolidating images of the (now past) future(s). This project provides research into the dynamics of these past (space) futures, in order to offer a more complex understanding of the memory processes that shape our visions of the past and its future(s). Analysis of cinematic aesthetics is used to investigate how these futures are conceived formally, and whose and which conceptualizations of the future Soviet science fiction cinema thematised, (re)created, and portrayed; to elaborate how films act as mnemonic agents, in shaping different visualizations of the past and its futures for different audiences. These questions are important for the understanding of contemporary (post-)Soviet and post-socialist nostalgia for the Soviet future. This project will examine the aesthetics of post-Sputnik (1957-1990) Soviet space-themed science fiction cinematography as memory practices, using both contextual cultural studies analysis and the methodological toolbox of neoformalist film analysis." "Creative Processes in the Performing Arts: An Integrative Model for Genetic Research in Theatre and Dance Studies." "Luc Van Den Dries" "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "Preparation of a project that delves into the creative processes of a carefully selected range of leading European theatre and dance artists, scrutinizing the procedures, media, and methods they employ for making work. Through a comprehensive survey of the different stages of artistic creation in theatre and dance, this study will develop the first integrative model for conducting genetic research in these domains. In contrast to literary studies, which has a fairly well established tradition in analyzing the genesis of literary texts (or what is called ""genetic criticism""), there is currently no adequate methodological framework that captures both the scope and dynamic nature of creative processes in theatre and dance. As living art forms that typically involve embodied and intangible knowledge, theatre and dance require distinct methods for examining their coming-into-being. The project will build the foundations for genetic research on theatre and dance by opening up ground-breaking avenues for examining the key determinants of creative processes in these domains, including documentation, training, rehearsal, performance, and context. These layers of artistic creation will be assessed by means of an integrative and interdisciplinary framework that sets new frontiers for genetic research on theatre and dance." "Wagner in Antwerp (1972-1987), an Inquiry into Opera Staging." "Kurt Vanhoutte" "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "This project measures the impact of the emancipation of the opera director in Antwerp's opera scene between 1972 and 1987. Video footage of productions and archival research in the yet undisclosed archives of the former KVO of Antwerp should enable us to reconstruct dramaturgical concept and mise-en-scène in both traditional readings and the more radical re-interpretations (called Regietheater) of Wagner's works, after which broader evolutions in opera direction become apparent." "Culture of spectacle. An interdisciplinary platform for historical research into film, theatre, dans and music performances." "Kurt Vanhoutte" "Research Centre for Visual Poetics" "An interdisciplinary platform for historical research on film, theatre, dance and musical performance. Cultures of Spectacles is an international interdisciplinary research community of scholars working on a diversity of spectacles. Our research is generally historic and focusses on the era from the beginning of the belle époque (appr. 1870) to the definitive breakthrough of television. Before performances or spectacles moved to the living room with the advent of television, they were the prerogative of public spaces such as cinema's, theatres, concert halls, circuses, music-halls, variety theatres and multi-functional spaces such as village halls, fairs or squares. Despite variations in their dispositive, what unites these spaces is that they host attractions, or spectacles that were either performed live or projected in front of a living audience. Individual members of these audiences usually belonged to different audience groups as well: people not only went to the theatre, but also the circus or to a music performance. Moreover, very often different forms of spectacle were often consumed in the same space and they were even part of the same show. In the early 19th century for example, films were part of variety programs; circus - and vaudeville acts were performed at fancy fairs alongside musical attractions, film screenings, freak shows, etc… Despite their commonalities, these different forms of spectacle are mostly studied separately, in well-defined academic disciplines (e.g., film -, dance -, performance – and theatre studies, cultural history, heritage studies, music history…). In bringing scholars from these different fields together, we aim to break down the disciplinary boundaries between a wide range of domains focussing on different types of spectacle and open the way for future interdisciplinary research on cultures of spectacle."